For nearly a hundred years poetry had dealt with manners and the life of towns--the gay, prosaic life of Congreve or of Pope. The sole concession to the life of nature was the old pastoral, which, in the hands of cockneys like Pope and Ambrose Philips, who merely repeated stock descriptions at second or third hand, became even more artificial than a _Beggars Opera_ or a _Rape of the Lock_. These at least were true to their environment, and were natural just because they were artificial. But the _Seasons_ of James Thomson, published in installments from 1726-1730, had opened a new field. Their theme was the English landscape, as varied by the changes of the year, and they were written by a true lover and observer of nature. Mark Akenside's _Pleasures of Imagination_, 1744, published the year of Pope's death, was written, like the _Seasons_, in blank verse; and although its language had the formal, didactic cast of the Queen Anne poets, it pointed unmistakably in the new direction. Thomson had painted the soft beauties of a highly cultivated land--lawns, gardens, forest-preserves, orchards, and sheep-walks. But now a fresh note was struck in the literature, not of England alone, but of Germany and France--romanticism, the chief element in which was a love of the wild. Poets turned from the tameness of modern existence to savage nature and the heroic simplicity of life among primitive tribes. In France, Rousseau introduced the idea of the natural man, following his instincts in disregard of social conventions. In Germany Bodmer published, in 1753, the first edition of the old German epic, the _Nibelungen Lied_. Works of a similar tendency in England were the odes of William Collins and Thomas Gray, published between 1747 and 1757; especially Collins's _Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands_, and Gray's _Bard_, a Pindaric in which the last survivor of the Welsh bards invokes vengeance on Edward I., the destroyer of his guild. Gray and Mason, his friend and editor, made translations from the ancient Welsh and Norse poetry. Thomas Percy's _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_, 1765, aroused the taste for old ballads. Richard Kurd's _Letters on Chivalry and Romance_, Thomas Warton's _History of English Poetry_. 1774-1778, Tyrwhitt's critical edition of Chaucer, and Horace Walpole's Gothic romance, the _Castle of Otranto_, 1765, stimulated this awakened interest in the picturesque aspects of feudal life, and contributed to the fondness for supernatural and mediaeval subjects. James Beattie's _Minstrel_, 1771, described the educating influence of Scottish mountain scenery upon the genius of a young poet. But the most remarkable instances of this passion for wild nature and the romantic past were the _Poems of Ossian_ and Thomas Chatterton's literary forgeries.